Micro Mavericks Observations

So 10.9 is "GM" (gold master) and will be hitting the Apple Store probably around the next hardware refresh for the usual $20.

Thought I'd give it a whirl on my 2011 MacBook Pro 17". In no particular order:

- Upgrading from 10.8.5 on a Seagate hybrid took a bit under an hour. The upgrade went smoothly, my system is doing fine so far.

- Login screen is a flat dark grey.

- New apps include Maps and iBooks. That's about it. They both add to the dock.

- Contacts, Calendar, and Notes all lose the faux leather/binder/paper appearance and are flat like iOS7 apps. Oddly enough Game Center is totally unchanged.

- Widget page background is not LEGO anymore, it's a plain grid pattern.

- Tabs in Finder (cmd-T like Safari opens new tab).

- Safari 7.0, the Top Sites page looks different than I remember

- Multi-display - Worth the $20 by itself if you have 2+ displays. OS X finally has *nice* multi-monitor support. Full-screen apps don't grey out the other displays anymore, separate full-screen apps can be run on each display, full menu bars on each display, and the dock (signifying the primary display) can easily be moved from screen to screen.

- on a clean install (an Air I had laying around), the default background is the Mavericks wave image from the Apple 10.9 preview page. ( Apple - OS X Mavericks - Do even more with new apps and features. ). It's ok but maybe too bright for me.

Overall, it's 10.5->10.6 in "doesn't look new" at first, but under the hood changes seem to be more the focus. And I will not miss that stupid leather trim.

 

Do you have any games you can install/test to check out performance now that 10.9 has support for OpenGL 4.0?

 

I would test it, but Im running a HD3000 and Im fairly sure it doesnt support opengl 4

my impressions are fairly good, they made some improvements under the hood and those things are fairly nice, to top that Im running it in target disk mode with usb 2.0, so to say that the OS actually works doing that is rather impressive

 

I doubt there are any OS X programs that exist publicly that use OpenGL4 yet... just because it can run OpenGL doesn't mean programs use it if they are still programmed for say... 2.1 or 3.2. Maybe after Mavericks has been out a bit, a few games may come out that use it.

 

I don't game on my Macs so I can't offer any input there. I have a gaming PC for that stuff. 8)

So far I haven't really seen anything amazingly new. One thing I saw is iCloud can now cloud-store passwords and stuff like credit cards. Which scares me a bit, I hate storing my credit card info anywhere.

 

Have you encountered any apps that broke right out of the box (i.e. unsupported) when you upgraded?

 

Not yet. My apps are fairly limited. I'm going to be throwing some of the apps from work at it for testing next week.